It’s fascinating how the fundamentals of business-to-business marketing are the same today as they were 50 years ago. It’s still about relationships although today we have new tools and techniques at our disposal.

You can buy attention (advertising). You can beg for attention from the media (PR). You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales). Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free.

Real time is a new mindset in marketing, and that's what inbound marketing is all about.

Instead of one-way interruption, Web marketing is about delivering useful content at just the right moment that a buyer needs it.

Nobody cares about your products (except you)

If you are a marketing professional who wants to reach your buyers directly, many experts will say that the media is the only way to tell your story, and that press releases only to reach journalists - not your buyers directly. They'll say that bloggers are geeks in pajamas who don't matter. They are wrong.

Today's marketing success comes from self-publishing web content that people want to share. It's not about gimmicks. It's not about paying an agency to interrupt others.